Either you're projecting a lot into my choice of words or it's because English isn't my native language.

From my experience almost all cases where one party wants out and the other wants to continue (not just in tech) involve some amount of cash changing hands.

That amount being zero is just a special case for when very little value was accumulated. In that light giving "just walk away" as the general advice, even though it might be right in this case, is quite overly simplistic in my opinion.

And if your partner is also your friend you should also take that into account of course but from what I could tell the OP didn't mention anything about that.